Error logs have been implemented in communications systems for almost as long as communication systems have existed. Error logs are normally maintained as files in the communication network servers that serve the client computers in the network. The error log maintains a record of everything that went wrong while the server was running. It also contains diagnostic messages, such as notifications of when the particular server was started or shut down. The user is enabled to set his error log level to control the number and type of messages that will be in his error log file. The errors may be in several categories, e.g. document errors such as “document not found”; communication errors, on the Web, for example, CGI (Common Gateway Interface) errors; as well as “server start”, “server stop messages”. Thus, entries are made to error logs on server stop/start, access failures, lost connections, timeouts and cancellations by visitors. Error logs, and particularly Web applications thereof, are generally described in the text, Internet, The Complete Reference, Millennium Edition, Margaret L. Young et al., Osborne/McGraw-Hill, Berkeley, Calif., 1999 at Chapter 32, Analyzing Web Traffic at pp. 755–768.
Conventionally, such communication error logs were used for diagnostic or trouble-shooting purposes in response to server or other communication shortcomings or failures. Consequently, the error data was sensed or listened for at selected points or nodes in the server controlled communications and the data, indicative of particular error conditions, stored in error log files in association with the communication network servers. Then the stored data in the error log was periodically sampled in regular cycles.
However, over the past decade, data communications has been greatly changed through the rapid development of the Internet or Web with its related distribution of documents, media and files. The convergence of the electronic entertainment and consumer industries with data processing exponentially accelerated the demand for wide ranging communication distribution channels, and the Web or Internet, which had quietly existed for over a generation as a loose academic and government data distribution facility, reached “critical mass” and commenced a period of phenomenal expansion. With this expansion, businesses and consumers have direct access to all matter of documents and computer files. This rapid expansion has brought hundreds of millions of Web users at hundreds of millions of Web stations, i.e. client computer stations, to the Web.
Because of the varying business needs involved, many of these users of communication systems customers have shown dissatisfaction with conventional error logging, and are seeking to be able to make real-time responses to certain error conditions.